Ask Eat Like a Man: What to Cook in a Fire Pit

Josh Ozersky is a James Beard Award-winning food writer, B-list food personality, and noted polymath and deviant. The founder of Meatopia, he will answer all your questions on meat, food, food writing, relationships, restaurants, or cooking. He is also available for private tutorials.

This is a great question! I guess I would have to say something big, like a whole standing rib roast, the king of meats. But if you really want to get maximal drama out of the thing, and have plenty guests, I would actually go for a full steamship round, if you can find one. Basically it is the whole back leg of a steer, and while it's actually not that good, its immense primordial appearance will overawe all your friends, which is obviously your ardent wish.

I've heard this argument a million times, Shane, and I don't buy it. I went one step further, and visited a beef slaughterhouse and processing plant, and I still don't look at steak any differently. I consider hunting and other blood sports utterly immoral, despite the fact that hunters are usually great guys, and rarely murderous in private life. I don't think you should kill animals for fun. I'm sorry. It doesn't matter if you eat it afterwards, either. If all you wanted was food you would just go to the supermarket.

I can't go along with you on that, Stephanie, just because pepperoni, even singly, tends to create a major grease slick on pizza that — depending on the how much and how thin the slices are — can melt the cheese and pour onto your new Arya Stark shirt. It's obviously the best topping, though, so I do order it, but I usually combine it with some dryer meat, like sausage or meatballs. Occasionally my wife insists on ordering non-meat toppings, so I will mushrooms or eggplant, which are sort of like honorary meats.

Absolutely, Matthew. I was a bachelor cooking in a studio apartment for most of my adult life. I would concentrate on things you can cook in the oven, since you likely don't have much range space, and anyway you don't want your studio to smell like cooking grease, not if you ever plan on getting laid there. Cook things like whole chickens and pork shoulders and beef loin roasts that look and taste great, and whose ample leftovers you can keep in the refrigerator. Look for foods, like high-end buffalo mozzarella and high-end Massimo Bottura balsamic vinegar, that require no cooking at all. On the rangetop, cook stuff like eggs, grilled cheese, and string beans that cook fast and don't give off smoke or splattering grease.

Eating it cold does have the advantage of not requiring you to walk away from the refrigerator. I will say that. The easiest thing is to lightly oil a cookie sheet or bake pan and reheat it in a 300-degree oven for ten to twelve minutes — just long enough to warm the cheese without melting it. (Pizza, reheated or otherwise, being something that should be eaten warm.) The problem with that is the crust doesn't really crisp up – which is the whole point of reheating pizza, from my point of view. So the master method of reheating pizza is to take a pan, the thicker the better, coat it with a little good olive oil, and to leave the pizza in it at the lowest setting for a half hour or so. The bottom will be crisp, the cheese warm but not hot, and the result better than when the pizza was alive. The downside is that this method only works for one slice at a time.

They don't. It looks like blood, but it's actually myoglobin, a kind of oxygen fuel that lives in muscles. It tastes very good and should be preserved on the cutting board at all costs. Of course, if you cut a steak too soon, while this "juice" is still hot and thin, it will all rush out, leaving you with chewy, dry muscle tissue. It should be sort of thick. That's why you rest meat — so it can coalesce a little bit before slicing.

It is confusing! And to make matters worse, it varies from one restaurant to another. But the basic idea is that the chef, which means "chief," is the boss and tells everyone what to do. S/he creates the menu, orders the food, hires and fires the cooks, and generally runs the kitchen. "Executive chef" is the same thing, but usually means that s/he's not in fact ever there, and that the chef de cuisine runs the show. This unheralded role actually is the most important in terms of what you eat from night to night — s/he's the person who is actually standing at the pass, telling everybody what to make, and finishing the plates on the pass if it's that kind of restaurant. A sous chef is typically his underboss, third in rank, but sometimes they call the chef de cuisine and executive sous, which makes no sense at all. I hope this clears everything up. Does it? I bet it doesn't.

There is hardly any good fried chicken in New York, or, if the truth be told, most cities, including those in the deep south. Fried chicken isn't really a restaurant food. It requires a person to cook it in a greasy, oversized cast-iron pan for 20 minutes or more, and hardly any restaurant works that way. On top of that, a big part of the fried-chicken experinece, in my opinion, is the pan gravy, which comes from what's left in the pan after you pour out the oil. But they never pour out the oil in restaurants, at least not during service. Also, nearly all the chicken in restaurants is overbreaded, sometimes to a ludicrous extreme. The one exception is Charles Pan-Fried Chicken, in Harlem, which is pretty much the perfect fried chicken, albeit without gravy.

Is this a trick question? Obviously wine. I think you are trying to trip me up. I don't really like to drink beer with food, as beer is a kind of food itself, and tends to fill you up. The good craft beers are even worse; drinking a big porter or Belgian ale with meat is like having a milkshake. Cider is OK for heavy, greasy meats that require a lot of crisp, acidic, dry liquid to cut them. Personally, I prefer to drink orange soda or sweet tea with grilled or barbecued meats, and big, Parkerized, jammy wines with things like pasta. For high-end steak there is only one accompaniment: grand cru bordeaux.

I'm neither, actually. The best fried-chicken chain is Bojangles. Go to one sometime (my favorite is the one in the Charlotte airport.) The pieces are half-again the size of Popeye's or KFC's, which means they lived longer, which makes them taste more like chicken. Also, they are not overbreaded (see above) and have a pleasing coating of MSG on top, which is the key to great fried chicken, like all soul food.

That was your last straw? Not the bacon explosion, or bacon cologne, or bacon lube? I jumped off the bacon train years ago, at least publicly, but for me the fatal turn was when people started looking for applewood-smoked bacon. Bacon = hickory.

BBQ Guy here refers to one of the most freakish of regional hamburger traditions, one never seen outside of central Connecticut, and for good reason. The steamed hamburger is a monstrosity, gray and mushy and invariably overcooked. Hamburgers were meant to be grilled or griddled; the brown crust is an essential part of it. I am being very dogmatic this week. But I feel very strongly about these things. If you want to try a great hamburger that isn't browned, I would suggest the "cupping" method, where you sear a burger under a covered dome of some kind; then it steams and browns simultaneously.

Is it? My guess is that you are going mostly to middle-tier supermarkets. Any specialty butcher will have it, or most ghetto supermarkets. Failing that, you might look into a local CSA or farmer's market, which will have more of the stuff than they know what to do with.

Definitely don't braise them first. They will fall apart on the grill, and anyway, who wants to braise short ribs in summer? The Vietnamese plan isn't a bad one. But honestly, if you get really high-quality boneless short ribs — which you can, at any Whole Foods — you can just grill them like steaks. They are actually better than most steaks. I do this all the time, to the point that I usually have some rare grilled short rib in the refrigerator, which is great, especially when sliced very thin.